Online lottery site LuckySurf.com, announced Wednesday that it will launch a subsidiary serving China and southeast Asia through a recent agreement with Hong Kong investors.
The investors, who were not disclosed, invested about US$4 million in a new venture called LuckySurfAsia.com.
Like its parent, the site will offer users a daily chance to win US$1 million.
As one of the first movers in the mainland Asian region, LuckySurf said it thinks the venture will be well positioned to rapidly expand market penetration, hopefully to become Asia’s leading online sweepstakes company.
“Games of chance are very popular throughout much of Asia, and LuckySurfAsia.com gives people the opportunity to win one million US dollars daily,” said a spokesman for the new venture. “Everyone wants to get rich quick, and the LuckySurf.com model makes it easy.”
That, and LuckySurf is enjoying moderate success here in the states — it’s currently ranked in Jupiter Media Metrix’s top 50 Internet properties — and the company is banking that its domestic recipe for success will carry over to the mainland Asian market. The company earlier this year announced that it had reached profitability — still a relative rarity among Internet businesses.
LuckySurf said it plans to develop a presence in Hong Kong and China first, then to target other countries in the southeast Asian region — which does not include Japan.
Because the market is so new for online lotteries in countries like China, company officials said they believe that LuckySurfAsia.com will take somewhat longer to generate the same amount of traffic that LuckySurf.com has done.
Development and support work for the LuckySurfAsia.com site will be done by the LuckySurf.com team in the US, the company said.
